Media

Fibers on Primetime

OSU is apparently the only place in the world where mainstream researchers are looking into “Morgellons”. The research is being carried out by Professor Randy Wymore as a discretionary project. So far they make two claims:

1) They have extracted fibers from under the skin of Morgellons patients

2) They have been unable to identify the fibers, despite extensive efforts

Here’s the fiber they showed on Primetime:

It’s in the hands of a doctor, who they blindsided by handing him this picture and telling him that despite extensive testing, it was like no fiber known to exist.

He handled it rather well, responding “one fiber does not make a new disease”, and we could very well leave it at that, since it sums things up nicely. But let’s take a closer look at the OSU evidence.

Here’s what has been revealed so far:

We have tested three fibers, two blue, one red.
We are completely unable to determine what these fibers are made from, because there is no match in any known databases.
There isn’t even anything that is a close match.
The red fiber is chemically different to the blue fibers.
The blue fibers are chemically identical to each other.
The fibers sat in acid and many other solvents we had for a week, but they did not leach color.
The fibers did not melt or boil when heated to 1400F (760C). They kept their structural integrity, although they did turn black (whereas anything organic would be ash at those temps)

Not, a lot, but at least it’s getting towards some scientific evidence. Unfortunately it really just raises a lot more questions than it answers.

What about some simpler info on the fibers? How wide were they? How long? How ductile were they?

Where did these fibers come from? Different people? What other symptoms did they have?

How were the fibers extracted? Where on the body were they? How many other fibers did the person have?

What parameters were used to search for the fibers in databases? What databases? FTIR? What is the statistical significance of not finding a substance in this database?

What acid was used? How were they heated?

They showed an FTIR graph on the show:

Is this a graph of the mystery material? Unfortunately it’s two graphs overlaid, so you can’t tell much. Why does Wymore not tell us what the peaks were for this fiber?
I could go on, but the point is that this new evidence really suggests almost nothing. If anything the fact that the red and the blue fibers were different suggests that this is NOT something produced inside the body, as that would be much more likely to produce identical fibers.

The high melting point of the fibers suggests it is not organic, which again is a point against it being produced inside the body. It point much more strongly to environmental contamination.

So what we have is three unknown fibers, of unknown origin. The characteristics of these fibers seem to suggest they are not organic, hence were not produced inside the body.

The wider question here is why Dr. Wymore is participating in this media extravaganza? he personally is convinced that “something” is going on with “some” morgellons patients. But refuses to say why. He’s even said he’s “months beyond” trying to explain why. yet he has no problem with appearing on television and hence convincing thousands of vulnerable people that they have a novel pathogen, and should ignore their doctor’s advice.

Wymore is soliciting charitable contributions. He has a responsibility to explain why.

——————————-

Addendum: Here’s another source of chemically treated red white and blue fibers:

Any guesses?

August 11, 2006 by Mick West Media Science

ABC ‘Morgellons’ Medical Mystery

The “Medical Mysteries” series is proving to be quite a money maker for ABC. The New York Daily News reports:

It’s been a challenging summer for the usually dominant ABC. How tough? Reality offerings have crashed and burned. Few are watching reruns of “Lost,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Desperate Housewives.” But things are looking up. ABC News’ “Medical Mysteries” series, which examines bizarre medical conditions, has turned out to be a real crowd- pleaser.

So it’s not surprising that they would continue to promote the series, and as part of this promotion offer up a preview story on their ABC “news” site, right next to the wolfman, the echolocating blind men, and the women who smell like dead fish.

The ABC Story features Morgellons Patients: Brandi Koch, Anne Dill, Greg Smith and also Mary Leitao, the founder of the MRF, and her son, Drew.

Leitao’s part in the story is interesting, since it explains the start of the Morgellons phenomenon:

Armed with research, Leitao took her son to a doctor at one of the country’s leading hospitals. He dismissed her tale of fibers and wrote to her pediatrician, saying that her son needed Vaseline for his lips and that his mother needed a thorough psychiatric evaluation.

well, you would think that the next logical step in the story would be to explain how she found her son’s fibers were not normal, and disproved all the doctors, but no, we get:

Undaunted, Leitao began poring through the medical literature looking for clues. What she discovered was a 17th-century reference to a strange disease with “harsh hairs” called “morgellons.”

A disease where infants have a fever, and then you rub milk on them, hairs spring from their backs, which you pluck, and the fever vanishes. Nothing to do with anything. Why do they keep bringing this up?

What does Mary say about Drew’s fibers:

“What I saw were bundles of fibers, balls of fibers,” Leitao says. “There was red and blue.” Even stranger, they glowed under ultraviolet light.

I have explained red and blue fibers before. I’ve also explained the glowing (although that’s usually white fibers, which Mary also found, just did not mention in this story). I’ve even discussed the fibers emerging from his lip. There is no evidence at all that Drew had anything at all unusual going on.

Now here’s something I’m looking forward to seeing:

Dr. Greg Smith of Gainesville, Ga., has been a pediatrician for the past 28 years. He claims a fiber is coming out of his big toe, and he has video footage to prove it.

Video footage of fibers emerging is something I’ve been suggesting for a while. The fibers are the only really interesting thing about “this disease” for which you might have a chance of getting some evidence.

The rest of the article is similar to other media articles. Anne Dill (who has a very impressive photo gallery) says her husband died of Morgellons, but he was actually diagnosed with ALS. 4500 people are supposed to have contacted Leitao, when all they did was fill in an internet survey. A doctor says that the lesions form when people scratch themselves.But the real news, and what I suspect that MRF were so excited about before they collapsed, is that the Tulsa City police department were unable to identify some fibers collected from a Morgellons Patient by Randy Wymore:

Forensic scientist Ron Pogue at the Tulsa Police Crime Lab in Oklahoma checked a morgellons sample against known fibers in the FBI’s national database. “No, no match at all. So this is some strange stuff,” Pogue says. He thinks the skeptics are wrong. “This isn’t lint. This is not a commercial fiber. It’s not.”

The lab’s director, Mark Boese, says the fibers are “consistent with something that the body may be producing.” He adds, “These fibers cannot be manmade and do not come from a plant. This could be a byproduct of a biological organism.”

What kind of obscure biological organism produces fibers? Bombyx mori? Rodentia Chinchillidae? Ovis aries? Exactly how extensive is this FBI national database, and how do you check a sample against it? Here’s an earlier mention of the involvement of the Tulsa Police:

The fibers, about the size of small eyebrow hairs, are not living organisms, Dr. Wymore decides. He teams with a Tulsa police department crime lab to sort through fiber samples, and though the lab owns a database of more than 800 fibers, these fibers match nothing.

800 fibers does not sound like very many to me. I bet they don’t have this one:

or this one:

I’ve got more. My point is that 800 fibers might cover 90% of the common household fibers found in your average bit of lint, but there’s still probably over 10,000 other uncommon fibers like the above – lots of room for unidentified fibers. (A prize to the first person to correctly identify the above two photos – they are from a QX5 at 60x, so are about 3mm across).

Here’s a natural man-made fiber (the large one on the bottom right):

I KNOW they don’t have that one in their fiber database. Why? I made it myself, simply by firmly rubbing my upper arm with a fingertip after having a hot shower. Some old sun-dried skin sloughed off, and rolled up with natural skin oil and sebum, forming this fiber-like shape. Everyone has these “fibers” from time to time, not everyone really looks at them with a microscope, or asks the police to identify them.

Here’s a much better article on Morgellons, from the Associated Press:

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/living/health/15227993.htm

He recruited two Oklahoma State faculty physicians. They tweezed fibers from beneath the skin of some Morgellons patients who visited the Oklahoma State Center for Health Sciences in Tulsa in February, Wymore said, and sent those samples to the Tulsa Police Department’s forensic laboratory.

The police checked the samples against carpet and clothing fibers and other materials, and conducted chemical analyses and other tests. Nothing matched, said Mark Boese, the police lab’s director.

“How it is being produced, I don’t know,” Boese said. He theorized the fibers could be produced by human hair follicles that somehow encapsulated pollutants processed by the body.

I’ve nothing against the Tulsa Police forensic department (although they do seem to be big fans of CSI). But again, all they have said is they cannot identify some fibers, and they don’t think they are man-made or plant fibers. Hopefully more information will be forthcoming, but they have not explained how they have scientifically determined they are “some strange stuff”. What tests were run? What were the results of the tests? The Tulsa police has some nice equipment. Were these tests run with public money? Can we have the results?

Maybe we’ll see more more details on the show. But remember, ABC is here to entertain you, their aim is to build market share. Keep that in mind, when weighing their evidence. Is it possible that there is some less entertaining evidence? How many fibers were looked at? How many of those fibers were simply not entertaining enough?

Wymore breaks with MRF

This morning, (Aug 4th 2006), the Morgellons Research Foundation removed every single reference to Professor Randy Wymore from their web site: morgellons.org

As well as removing all mention of him as “Research Director”, they also removed the “Letter to Doctors“, the “OSU Rounds” article, and all his “Medical Updates”

His email address, along with the email address of the Chairman of the Board Charles Holman, and the Nurse Coordinator Cindy Casey, were removed from the “Contact” page. Leaving only Leitao, Buckner and Cowles.

The MRF contact for medical researchers has changed from morgellons@okstate.edu to morgellons@aol.com (although morgellons@okstate.edu is still valid for any researcher who wants to help the OSU research effort).

Dr Greg Smith and his wife have also been fully removed from the site.

[Update: Aug 5th – All seven nurses: Cindy Casey, Jo Ann Mangili, Judy Smith, Diane Gay, Kristen Seargeant, Patti Nash and Donna Doherty, have been removed from the site]

I have no interest in the politics here, but this is a significant event in the brief history of Morgellons. The involvement of Professor Wymore has been a major part of every single news story about Morgellons. His presence lent credibility to the story. Without Wymore, the MRF would never have been able to get the major coverage they have been able to. Without Wymore, the CNN, Today Show, GMA and Prime Time Medical Mysteries shows would never have happened.

Without Wymore’s participation in the publicity machine of the MRF, the public interest would have been greatly muted, and the CDC would not have been forced to start an investigation, which in turn led to even more publicity.

My position all along is that there has not been sufficient evidence to support Morgellons being a distinct disease where fibers emerge from the skin. I felt that the excessive publicity given to Morgellons, based on this limited and unscientific evidence, was damaging to the health of a vulnerable segment of the population.

I hope that these changes at the MRF will prompt the media to take a closer look at exactly what has been going on, and to temper their sensationalistic, entertainment based, health reporting.

I also hope that people who think they have Morgellons might be prompted to consider that perhaps there is some doubt in the matter, hence consider they might have something else, and hopefully seek appropriate treatment.

August 4, 2006 by Mick West Media MRF

White Fibers Fluoresce Blue under UV

Hardly rocket science, anyone who has been to a nightclub in the past thirty years would have noticed that white clothing fluoresces blue-white under UV lights (UV, Ultra Violet, Black Light, Woods Lamp, same thing). Particularly white cotton, including the white fibers in denim jeans.

Yet, Time Magazine says:

Dr. Gregory Smith wants people to know it’s not all in his head. According to the Gainesville, Ga., pediatrician, white fibers have been burrowing into his skin for the past two years, making him feel like he’s under constant bombardment from insects or cactus needles. Shine a black light on these fibers and they’ll fluoresce blue, he says, just like something you’d see in The Twilight Zone.

And the Morgellons Research Foundation says:

They are generally described by patients as white, but clinicians also report seeing blue, green, red, and black fibers, that fluoresce when viewed under ultraviolet light (Wood’s lamp).

It all started with Mary Leitao, who “showed the doctor how the fibers glowed under an ultraviolet light”.

So what’s going on here? Why does the MRF and their publicity department not know that practically all white clothing fibers fluoresce under UV light? Why do they keep repeating that their fibers fluoresce as if it’s something special?

If they can’t get that science right, something that is practically common knowledge, then what else might they have got wrong?

Here’s some white acrylic fibers at 200x, with normal and UV lighting.

Not like something out of The Twilight Zone, just normal clothing fibers.

Update (Aug 1st, 2006): For an explanation as to exactly WHY they fluoresce, see here:

www.techno-preneur.net/ScienceTechMag/july06/Fluorescent_brighteners.pdf

July 30, 2006 by Mick West Lymebusters Media Photos Science

Morgellons on Television

The Morgellons Research Foundation is an advocacy group. It has orchestrated the current media coverage by spoon-feeding a story to television news, both local and national. For those in the media who would like to do a similar story, I present the following 12-step method:

Step 1 – Find some Morgellons Patients. This is not difficult. Simply ask around on the Morgellons Research Foundation’s recommended Lymebusters forum. There are many people there who love to talk about their symptoms. Beware, as there are a few oddballs around, who might not quite be on message. Beware of patients with web sites that make them look obsessive, such as Anne Dill on Good Morning America, or Richard Vigil on 10News

Step 2 – V.O. – describe the symptoms of Morgellons in a scary manner, you want to hook your audience here. Note that thousands of people across the country have Morgellons, and there are hotspots of the disease in California, Texas and Florida.

Step 3 – Have the patient describe what is wrong with them, and have them show their lesions.

Step 4 – V.O. – Say these patients are being ignored by doctors, who claim it is all in their heads. It is important to set up sympathetic contrast in anticipation of step 9.

Step 5 – Zooming photos. Show photos of fibers and multi-colored fuzzballs, zoom and scroll while doing this, as it looks a lot more dramatic. Speak with a tone of amazement while describing the photos.

Step 6 – Professor Wymore soundbites – like “there’s definitely something going on“. Show Wymore in his Lab and wearing a white coat. Make it look like he’s an expert in this field. Do not mention he’s not a doctor. Do not mention he’s actually an assistant professor.

Step 7 – (Optional), show Wymore holding the letter he has written for sufferers to take to their doctors.

Step 8 – More zooming photos, this time describe how people find fibers inside their lesions. Try to make it sound impossible.

Step 9 – Find a doctor, interview him for hours, and show the line where he mentions “Delusions of Parasites“. Ignore complex terms like Neurotic Excoriations, Dermiatitis artefacta or “Case Definition“, as these cloud the issue.

Step 10 – Back to Wymore (or Ginger Savely), and have them say something to make the doctor seem silly. If it’s Savely, don’t mention she makes her living treating people who are convinced they have Morgellons.

Step 11 – A ray of hope: say that, at long last, the CDC is investigating Morgellons. Do not mention they are just investigating if there is any evidence that it exists in the first place.

Step 12 – Tie it up, cut back to your initial patient to remind the viewer of the human side of the story. V.O. about the hope they have. Make it real.

July 28, 2006 by Mick West Delusions Lymebusters Media Medical Professional MRF Science

and Statistics

I’ve touched on this subject before, but it keeps coming up in the media, so I’ll take the risk of repeating myself.

The Morgellons Research Foundation says:

Distinct geographic “cluster” areas of this disease have been noted near Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose and San Diego in California

It then shows a little map with those four cities highlighted, which makes it look like California is breaking out with acne.

Recently people have been noticing ominous parallels between those four random cities and medical centers. Here’s what they say on the Morgellons Research Foundation’s recommended forum:

Three of these cities, San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles, are home to a University of California Campus that includes a major medical center teaching facility and extensive bio research facilities.

Three of these cluster cities have an additional second University Campus located within a fifty mile range with a medical school and extensive bio research facilities.

San Jose is located 16 miles from Stanford Medical/Research facility and less than 50 miles from the UCSF Medical Center

This worries the lymebuster – perhaps they think this indicates that Morgellons is some kind of escaped pathogen which was simultaneously released from all four of these facilities. Is there any other way of explaining this?

Here’s what the lymebuster has to say:

The first person I showed this to said there is no possibility that the relationship is random. I am looking for a statistician to calculate what the odds are of these common factors of Morgellons cluster cities being random or not.

As someone else on this board likes to say, I’m a duck if all these converging factors are just a coincidence. I bet the odds against this being random are about a billion to one.

Close. Let’s see, if there are 400 cities in California, four of which are clusters of Morgellons and four have a med school with a bio research campus, what are the odds of them randomly being in the same four cites?

About 25 Billion to one! Higher than their guess, and they were including Texas. So clearly this relationship is NOT random. There must be something going on.

Okay, I’ll spill the beans, there are the most cases of Morgellons, and the biggest medical schools and bio-research facilities in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose and San Diego because:

THAT’S WHERE EVERYONE LIVES!

Top ten California cities by population:

1 Los Angeles 3,819,951
2 San Diego 1,266,753
3 San Jose 898,349
4 San Francisco 751,682
5 Long Beach 475,460
6 Fresno 451,455
7 Sacramento 445,335
8 Oakland 398,844
9 Santa Ana 342,510
10 Anaheim 332,361

The Morgellons Research foundation is just tossing out meaningless sound bites for the evening news, and their fans at Lymebusters are concocting fantastical stories around these McStatistics.

July 27, 2006 by Mick West Lymebusters Media Science

It’s the fibers, stupid!

I sometimes compare Morgellons with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, since they share many of the same symptoms.

CFS took a while to be recognized as a disease (and there is still much debate), since it’s just a collection of common symptoms that the sufferers feel. There is no real physical manifestation of the disease, which makes it hard to test for, since you just have to rely on verbal reports from the patient.

In this respect, Morgellons has a vast advantage over CFS when it comes to being recognized as a disease. Not only do sufferers have lesions on their skin, but most importantly, they have something entirely new to science, something so unusual that finding it immediately settles the diagnosis, since only Morgellons has this symptom.

It’s the fibers.

That’s really all that makes this proposed disease special. The fibers are the key to the whole matter. That is ALL that is needed to establish this as a new disease – you can work out the details of the other symptoms later, but if you simply establish that people are producing fibers, then you’ve proven your case.

The OSU team claim they could see fibers under the skin within 45 seconds. What exactly is the problem here. Can’t they just take a video and show us what they see? Why did they not do this when CNN was there for two days?

It’s very easy. All this talk about Morgellons vs. Delusions is a red herring. Fibers are real objective evidence, nothing to do with delusions. Just show the fibers coming out of the skin and you’ve made your case.

Wymore says he’s personally convinced, but he can’t get enough interest to persue it effectivly as other people think the patients are delusional.

Well, there’s a very simple way of proving that something new to science is going on, which is sure to get people excited.

It’s the fibers, stupid!

July 25, 2006 by Mick West Media Medical Professional MRF Science

Morgellons Myths

Various myths have arisen around the Morgellons story in the media. The problem with such myths is that by repetition, they get elevated from simple misrepresentations and errors to established facts. This site is about investigating some of the more unusual claims regarding Morgellons, and hopefully dispelling the Morgellons myths.

Myth #1 – 4500 People have Morgellons

False. 4500 people have filled in a survey on Morgellons.org, unfortunately the symptoms described in the survey are so vague that practically anyone could qualify as to having Morgellons. No usable case definition exists for Morgellons

Myth #2 – Since the CDC is investigating it, it must be real.

False. The CDC is investigating the Morgellons reports, to determine IF it is real. Dan Rutz, spokesman for the CDC, says “We don’t have any evidence to support that [there’s an infectious process going on]”, and “In the absence of any objective review, people have jumped to conclusions and found each other on the Internet and formed their own belief structure.”

Myth #3 – There is photographic evidence of Morgellons

False. There are a lot of photos, particularly of fibers. The problem is that the vast majority of these fiber photos look just like normal fibers from clothing, bandages, bedding and furniture. Fibers are everywhere, and they inevitably get onto your skin. One researcher claims to have found a few fibers he cannot identify, but forensic investigations often have unidentified fibers, so this tells us nothing.

Myth #4 – Doctors have observed fibers emerging from the skin

Dubious. The claim is that fibers were observed “within 45 seconds“, and yet on the recent CNN report, at least six star patients were examined over two days with the CNN cameras present, and using a portable video microscope. The best evidence they were able to present was a single blue cotton fiber laying on top of the skin. If the evidence is so obvious, why could it not be videoed?

Myth #5 – Morgellons sufferers are really sick, and it’s not all in their heads.

TRUE – Not a myth at all, yet the Morgellons Research Foundation seeks to portray this as a struggle between an new disease, and a summary diagnosis of mental illness. The real situation is a lot more complex.

The Morgellons research Foundation is currently gearing up for a new media promotional piece they are organizing with ABC’s Prime Time: Medical Mysteries, possible to be aired in early August. In this piece they will continue to promote these, and other, myths. I believe this deliberate misrepresentation of the facts is encouraging people to make decisions regarding their health care that may be harmful to their health.

July 25, 2006 by Mick West Media MRF

Morgellons and Neurotic Excoriations

Television likes to entertain. When you see television stories about Morgellons, they invariably show someone who has horrific open sores on their skin. This is very dramatic, and elicits sympathy for the sufferers, as well it should.

Then, when later in the segment they trot out their “Other side of the Debate”, they imply that the doctors will say “it’s all in their heads”.

The viewer might be confused at this point, since as the patient is obviously suffering from a horrible disease that causes nasty looking open sores, then how can it be all in their heads?

Well, I don’t think it’s all in their heads. But the open sores do not always have an entirely physical cause.

Look at these two photos:

The photos show a woman’s back covered in sores and scars. They are very similar except that the one on the right has less sores and scars.

Same woman, different times? No. Two different women, one of whom claims to have Mogellons, the other was diagnosed with Neurotic Excoriation. Which is which?
Here are the sources of the photos:

http://cherokeechas.com/worst.htm

http://www.dermnet.com – Neurotic Excoriations

Here’s another good example. Look at the scars, and compare them to the Morgellons sufferer.

And here’s a very short article explaining what NE is, the suprisingly high incidence, and the MANY causes:
http://www.aafp.org/afp/20011215/1981.html

I highly recommend the above article, I wish someone could show it to the producers of future news stories on Morgellons before they hurt more people with their misrepresentations in the name of entertainment.

July 22, 2006 by Mick West Media Photos Science

Fibers on CNN

The recent CNN story on Morgellons (text version) was interesting as it focused on Randy Wymore’s examination of fibers, and actually showed his colleges removing fibers from a patient, and looking at them under a microscope.

In absence of any epidemiological studies, the only thing that makes the claims of Morgellons at all notable are the “fibers” that sufferers claim to have emerging from their skin. Now I’ve written quite a lot about this before, basically showing that fibers are everywhere, and that many of the photos of fibers shown can easily be identified as Kleenex, or clothing fibers.

The whole Morgellons case hinges around these fibers, which was the thing that originally got me interested – I think it’s high time that I get back to examining the fiber evidence, starting with the CNN video.

First of all, we have Dr Wymore in a thrift store, collecting fiber specimens from clothing with some scotch tape. The reporter then asks him if the fibers he found from Morgellons patients resemble clothing fibers. He responds “No, not at all, totally different”.

Here’s what Dr Wymore told me, on May 22, 2006:
“You see, we do indeed find environmental contaminants in samples from Morgellons sufferers. Definitely cotton, likely from bandages and cellulose fibers, probably from tissue. But, we are not interested in the contaminants that are everywhere. We take the time to sort through the known fibers to examine in more detail the ones that look unusual.”

So what he’s saying here is that he ignores that fibers he can identify, and keeps looking until he finds fibers he cannot identify. I asked him if he did not think that in any sufficiently large sample of household fibers (laundry lint, for example), there would not be some fibers that he would be unable to identify – but so far he has declined to answer.

Later we have some footage of the Morgellons group examining patients, plucking fibers off them, and looking at them through a microscope. Dr Rhonda Casey, DO, points at a small blue fiber and says “That is definitely not a hair, the blue thing there”.

The fiber she points at looks exactly like standard tiny lint fiber. Probably blue cotton. She carefully take it off, and makes a slide.

“This is what they saw”, the reporter says, and shows this picture:

There’s a blue fiber in the middle that looks like a cotton fiber. For some reasons there are a bunch of other fibers that were not next to the blue fiber before. The clear ones in the middle look like cotton or paper, the large brown ones look like human hairs (at about 80 microns they are the correct size). The very dark lines look like the edge of a large air bubble.

We then see several other images, one of which is clearly a damaged human hair – you can even see the scales.

So what’s going on here? Randy Wymore is finding fibers that look different (to him) from clothing fibers. Well, notwithstanding that it’s almost inevitable that you will find unidentified fibers wherever you look, what might make ordinary fibers turn into the Morgellons fibers?

Let’s take a simplistic explanation. Say someone suffers from something that has symptoms of neurotic excoriations (they pick at their own skin, consciously or unconsciously). They are going to have many open lesions on their skin (forearms and faces being common areas). Now lesions are wet and sticky, so naturally they will have several tiny fibers stuck in them. Lesions also heal, so the tiny fibers become embedding in the new skin.

A few months later, just like a splinter, the fiber works its way to the surface of the skin. It may emerge at the original lesion site, or it may have migrated a few inches over. Is it surprising that a small blue piece of cotton that has spent many months under the skin, now looks nothing like clothing fibers plucked with scotch tape at the local thrift store?

That’s just a theory – but it’s a nice simple theory that explains things without introducing a mysterious pathogen. Occam’s Razor: “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity”. Before claiming that because he cannot identify some fibers, then a new disease exists, Professor Wymore must explain how he has fully discounted the multitude of far simple explanations.

I’ll simplify this to two questions:

1) In any large sample of household fibers, will there not always be some that are unidentified?
2) If a clothing fiber were embedded in the skin for a long period of time, and then emerged, would you be able to identify it as a clothing fiber?

June 23, 2006 by Mick West Media Medical Professional Photos

Media

Fibers on Primetime

ABC ‘Morgellons’ Medical Mystery

Wymore breaks with MRF

White Fibers Fluoresce Blue under UV

Morgellons on Television

and Statistics

It’s the fibers, stupid!

Morgellons Myths

Morgellons and Neurotic Excoriations

Fibers on CNN

The Evidence Indicates:

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